Scientific

of various

intellect, or in the most favourable position, can predict the future of only a few years hence. We see that ideas which yesterday served us as a guide die to-day, and will be replaced by others, we know not what, to-morrow. In this scientific advancement, among the triumphs of which we are living, all the nations of Europe contributions have been engaged. Some, with a venial pride, claim for themselves the glory of having taken nations, the lead. But perhaps each of them, if it might designate the country-alas! not yet a nation-that should occupy the succeeding post of honour, would inscribe Italy on its ballot. It was in Italy that Columbus was born; in Venice, destined one day to be restored to especially of Italy, newspapers were first issued. It was in Italy. Italy that the laws of the descent of bodies to the earth and of the equilibrium of fluids were first determined by Galileo. In the Cathedral of Pisa that illustrious philosopher watched the swinging of the chandelier, and, observing that its vibrations, large and small, were made in equal times, left the house of God, his prayers unsaid, but the pendulum clock invented. To the Venetian senators he first showed the satellites of Jupiter, the crescent form of Venus, and, in the garden of Cardinal Bandini, the spots upon the sun. It was in Italy that Sanctorio invented the thermometer; that Torricelli constructed the barometer and demonstrated the pressure of the air. It was there that Castelli laid the foundation of hydraulics and discovered the laws of the flowing of water. There, too, the first Christian astronomical observatory was established, and there Stancari counted the number of vibrations of a string emitting musical notes. There Grimaldi discovered the diffraction of light, and the Florentine academicians showed that dark heat may be reflected by mirrors across space. In our own times Melloni furnished the means of proving that it may be polarized. The first philosophical societies were the Italian ; the first botanical garden was established at Pisa; the first classification of plants given by Casalpinus. The first geological museum was founded at Verona; the first who cultivated the study of fossil remains were Leonardo da Vinci and Fracasta. The great chemical discoveries

of this century were made by instruments which bear the names of Galvani and Volta. Why need I speak of science alone? Who will dispute with that illustrious people the palm of music and painting, of statuary and architecture? The dark cloud which for a thousand years has hung over that beautiful peninsula is fringed with irradiations of light. There is not a department of human knowledge from which Italy has not extracted glory, no art that she has not adorned.

Notwithstanding the adverse circumstances in which she has been placed, Italy has thus taken no Causes of her insignificant part in the advancement of science. depression. I may at the close of a work of which so large a portion has been devoted to the relation of her influences, political and religious, on the rest of Europe, be perhaps excused the expression of a hope that the day is approaching in which she will, with Rome as her capital, take that place in the modern system to which she is entitled. The course of centuries has proved that her ecclesiastical relation with foreign countries is incompatible with her national life. It is that, and that alone, which has been the cause of all her ills. She has asserted a jurisdiction in every other government; the price she has paid is her own unity. The first, the all-important step in her restitution is the reduction of the papacy to a purely religious element. Her great bishop must no longer be an earthly prince. Rome, in her outcry for the preservation of her temporal possessions, forgets that Christian Europe has made a far greater sacrifice. It has yielded Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Calvary, the Sepulchre, the Mount of the Ascension. That is a sacrifice to which the surrender of the fictitious donations of barbarian kings is not to be compared.

The foregoing paragraphs were written in 1859. Since that time Italy has become a nation, Rome is its capital, Venice belongs to it. In 1870-71 I was an eye-witness of the presence of Italian troops in the Eternal City.

CHAPTER XII.

CONCLUSION.-THE FUTURE OF EUROPE.

Summary of the Argument presented in this Book respecting the mental Progress of Europe.

Intellectual Development is the Object of Individual Life.—It is also the Result of social Progress.

Nations arriving at Maturity instinctively attempt their own intellectual Organization.-Example of the Manner in which this has been done in China.-Its Imperfection.-What it has accomplished.

The Organization of public Intellect is the End to which European Civilization is tending.

A PHILOSOPHICAL principle becomes valuable if it can be used as a guide in the practical purposes of life.

General summary of the work.

Individual

and social life

have been considered;

The object of this book is to impress upon its reader a conviction that civilization does not proceed in an arbitrary manner or by chance, but that it passes through a determinate succession of stages, and is a development according to law. For this purpose, we considered the relations between individual and social life, and showed that they are physiologically inseparable, and that the course of communities bears an unmistakable resemblance to the progress of an individual, and that man is the archetype or exemplar of society. We then examined the intellectual history of Greecea nation offering the best and most complete lectual history illustration of the life of humanity. From the of Greece: beginnings of its mythology in old Indian legends and of its philosophy in Ionia, we saw that it passed through phases like those of the individual to its decrepitude and death in Alexandria.

in the intel

Europe.

Then, addressing ourselves to the history of Europe, we found that, if suitably divided into groups of and the ages, these groups, compared with each other history of in chronological succession, present a striking resemblance to the successive phases of Greek life, and therefore to that which Greek life resembles-that is to say, individual life.

For the sake of convenience in these descriptions we have assumed arbitrary epochs, answering to the periods from infancy to maturity. History justifies the assumption of such periods. There is a well-marked difference between the aspect of Europe during its savage The contrasts and mythologic ages; its changing, and grow- its ages dising, and doubting condition during the Roman play. republic and the Cæsars; its submissive contentment under the Byzantine and Italian control; the assertion of its manhood, and right of thought, and freedom of action. which characterize its present state-a state adorned by great discoveries in science, great inventions in art, additions to the comforts of life, improvements in locomotion, and the communication of intelligence. Science, capital, and machinery conjoined are producing industrial miracles. Colossal projects are undertaken and executed, and the whole globe is literally made the theatre of action of every individual.

Nations, like individuals, are born, pass through a predestined growth, and die. One comes to its end at an early period and in an untimely way; another, not until it has gained maturity. One is cut off by feebleness in its infancy, another is destroyed by civil disease, another commits political suicide, another lingers in old age. But for every one there is an orderly way of progress to its final term, whatever that term may be.

Now, when we look at the successive phases of individual life, what is it that we find to be their chief The object of characteristic? Intellectual advancement. And development we consider that maturity is reached when in- is intellect. tellect is at its maximum. The earlier stages are preparatory; they are wholly subordinate to this.

If the anatomist be asked how the human form advances to its highest perfection, he at once disregards all the

inferior organs of which it is composed, and answers that It is the same it is through provisions in its nervous structure in individual for intellectual improvement; that in succession it passes through stages analogous to those observed in other animals in the ascending scale, but in the end it leaves them far behind, reaching a point to which they never attain. The rise in organic development measures intellectual dignity.

life,

In like manner, the physiologist considering the vast and in the ani- series of animals now inhabiting the earth with mal series, us, ranks them in the order of their intelligence. He shows that their nervous mechanism unfolds itself upon the same plan as that of man, and that, as its advancement in this uniform and predetermined direction is greater, so is the position attained to higher.

and in the

The geologist declares that these conclusions hold good in the history of the earth, and that there has general life of been an orderly improvement in intellectual the globe. power of the beings that have inhabited it successively. It is manifested by their nervous systems. He affirms that the cycle of transformation through which every man must pass is a miniature representation of the progress of life on the planet The intention in both cases is the same.

Succession of

The sciences, therefore, join with history in affirming that the great aim of nature is intellectual automatism, improvement. They proclaim that the succesinstinct, and sive stages of every individual, from its earliest intelligence. rudiment to maturity-the numberless organic beings now living contemporaneously with us, and constituting the animal series-the orderly appearance of that grand succession which, in the slow lapse of time, has emerged-all these three great lines of the manifestation of life furnish not only evidences, but also proofs of the dominion of law. In all the general principle is to differentiate instinct from automatism, and then to differentiate intelligence from instinct. In man himself the three distinct modes of life occur in an epochal order through childhood to the most perfect state. And this holding good for the individual, since it is physiologically impossible to separate him from the race, what holds